There are, in the course of a lifetime, a few phrases and questions we never want to hear:

“We have your tax returns from last year, and something isn’t right."

“The boss would like to speak with you."

“You’re still away."

And for sure,

“Did you or did you not have sex with an underaged girl?"

The ways and means Pete Rose chose to mess up his life 30 and 40 years ago are no longer compelling. Their frequency makes them almost not newsworthy. Half the people around here are too young to remember Pete the player and manager. The other half have become desensitized. When I saw the headline Monday morning – “Rose accused of statutory rape" – my jaw didn’t exactly fall to the floor.

That’s an astoundingly distressing thing to say, and it owes to the 28-year post-Rose-al drip Pete’s life has become since his banishment from baseball. It’s the twisted gift that keeps on giving.

Two years ago John Dowd, the G-man whose investigation resulted in Rose’s banishment, went on a Philadelphia radio show and for some unexplained reason decided a quarter-century after the fact that accusing Rose of pedophilia was a good idea.

Rose-as-pedophile might be entirely true, or it might not be. The bigger point was, what was the point? Dowd beat Rose 26 years earlier, and he’s saying this now? If he knew it then, why didn’t he tell anyone? Sex with kids is a bigger crime than betting on baseball.

Dowd came off looking (and sounding, check out the audio online) like an Old Guy, piling on. Fox hired Rose for its national broadcast team. The Reds immortalized him with a statue. No one paid much attention to what Dowd said on the radio.

That’s where it should have ended, Rose shaking his head while suggesting Dowd was a sad old man. However, Rose being Rose, it could never have ended there.

The same quality that made Rose the Hit King has cost him over and over since: His supreme need to win, and his belief he can outlast anybody he needs to outlast to do it.

Rose’s march past Ty Cobb was the ultimate tribute to his doggedness. It convinced him he could do the same with Dowd and then-commissioner Bart Giamatti. Lie enough, deny enough, stonewall enough ... well, I’m Pete Rose and you’re not. You think you can beat me? Outlast me?

Isn’t this how he became the greatest singles hitter of all time?

Charlie Hustle didn’t have great natural skills, but his will was massive and defiant. He would be the last man standing.

That’s why he sued Dowd for defamation and opened up this most recent can of shame. He wanted to outlast Dowd. He needed one more game-winning hit.

"In 1973, when I was 14 or 15 years old, I received a phone call from Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds. Sometime after that, Pete Rose and I began meeting at a house in Cincinnati."

“It was at that house where, before my sixteenth birthday, Pete Rose began a sexual relationship with me. This sexual relationship lasted for several years. Pete Rose also met me in locations outside of Ohio where we had sex."

Dowd is as adept at defending himself as he was investigating Rose. He hired investigators to find Jane. One did.

Two people who know “Jane," who still lives in the area, told me Monday that Jane was driven to the house partly because she was too young to have a driver’s license. (And also because it wasn’t as if 34-year-old Pete could ring the doorbell at her parents house and exclaim, “Hi, I’m Pete!") Rose has admitted to having sex with Jane, while claiming in a written statement that he thought Jane was older than 16. Sixteen is the age of consent in Ohio.

And so on.

Rose declined via text to talk to me Monday. I’d have asked him what he was doing having sex with a child, legal or not, and why he felt compelled to defend himself against a clumsy charge made on a local radio show.

I don’t know the answer to the first question, but I do know the answer to the second. It was Pete, being Pete.